A study published in JAMA on July 27th  says that  insulin resistance is associated with a lower regional cerebral glucose metabolism and it causes worsened memory performance.

Researchers evaluated 150 cognitively normal male and female adults with an average age of nearly 61 years old. Data collected from the patients included cognitive testing, fasting blood glucose levels and PET scan imaging and other factors such as gender, BMI, apolipoprotein E4 genotyping, and family history. In the study, lower glucose metabolism was related to worse performance on both immediate and delayed memory scores.

Lower glucose metabolism in the left medial temporal lobe was associated with worse performance on immediate memory (beta=0.317; t148=4.08; P<0.001) and delayed memory (beta=0.305; t148=3.895; P<0.001) factor scores, according to the authors, who were led by Auriel Willette, PhD, at Iowa State University.

Researchers concluded that, their results show that insulin resistance, a prevalent and increasingly common condition in developed countries, is associated with significantly lower regional cerebral glucose metabolism, which in turn may predict worse memory performance. Midlife may be a critical period for initiating treatments to lower peripheral insulin resistance to maintain neural metabolism and cognitive function.

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